For several days, mostly clear skies are forecast, with temperatures in the high 40s to low 50s.

Bad news for the Winter Olympics: See above.

As to whether such weather strikes you as good or bad, it depends on who you are, where you are and what you're doing.

If you're shopping and hanging out in the city, it's wonderful. If you're a VANOC course worker or ticket seller, it's hell on skis. If you're a competition athlete or a competition spectator, it depends if you're at the top of a hill or the bottom.

That's often the way winter works in the maritime Northwest, but anyone who doesn't know a freezing level from a carpenter's level is destined to see the Games through an industrial-strength grumpiness.

Which may have accounted for some of the testiness Tuesday morning at the daily press briefing by VANOC for assembled media.

"Do you think this is the worst beginning to a Games ever?" a reporter, apparently in all sincerity, asked International Olympic Committee spokesperson Mark Adams.

"I really find it bizarre people are asking questions like that," said Adams, who was particularly miffed with coverage he was reading in papers from his native Britain. "What I read in the British press is actually no relation to what I'm seeing."

Unfortunately for the hosts, the pile-on has become easier.

The Games began in tragedy, with the accidental death of a Georgian luger in a training run.

There is the ongoing aesthetic cringe of the Olympic flame, an elaborate creation that is not on a tower but ground-bound on the waterfront, behind what one questioner called a "ratty-looking, prison-camp fence."

There have been snafus with media and spectator transportation, a power outage at Cypress, and lots of empty VIP seats at multiple venues. Monday night, long-track speedskating was delayed more than an hour by the breakdown of the ice-resurfacing machine, a non-Zamboni model that was all-electric. A non-green, real Zamboni is being shipped in from Calgary.

Then there was this description of the rolling headache of Cypress Mountain, site of most freestyle skiing events an hour north of the city, by VANOC spokesperson Rene Smith-Valade.

"Cypress is like your special child that's bright and talented and good looking and causes you all kinds of worries," she said. "But they're still your special child."

The "special child" created another palm-to-forehead moment Tuesday -- an announcement that another 20,000 standing-room, general admission tickets were canceled for safety reasons. That made for 28,000 tickets lost for eight events, at a cost of $1.5 million in refunds.

The danger: Melt may cause spectators and workers to go through the snow and get an appendage or torso stuck between hay bales trucked in for Cypress's base layer.

Why no one thought to make the pothole plunge an Olympic event, I can't say, but because they didn't, lawyers presumably said that VANOC will be in liability debt until global warming makes Winnipeg a port city unless spectators are told to stay away.

Relative to the estimated $260 million in Games ticket revenue, the cancellation is hardly an economic crippler. But emotionally, the fact is that those $50 tickets were the cheapest way for many to see an Olympic event, and perhaps their only chance.

Everyone understands that nothing can be done about weather, and no one is to blame for an episodic El Niño wrinkle in the atmosphere and ocean whose timing could not have been worse.

But weather is the one universal experienced by all at these far-flung Games. Yet there's nothing universal about the experience here.

Besides the continuing Cypress meltdown -- fog there delayed the start of the women's snowboard cross event -- alpine events at Whistler on Tuesday were again postponed, this time because of too much snow, and city dwellers were attempting to dry out from a drenching that began Monday evening.

Meteorological exasperation happens when ocean and mountains are close by in the temperate mid-latitudes, compounded by the warm Japanese Current in the Pacific, which helps keep the West Coast winters milder than in the East.

As someone who has spent a little time in the backcountry of the wet, west side of the Cascade Mountains, I can testify to three inevitabilities of a typical winter:

No high-tech fabric or exotic layering of clothing will keep snowmelt from puddling in one's underpants.

If you can see a mountain summit, it's going to rain; if you can't see it, it is raining.

The amount of ground fog is in direct proportion to the visibility needed to get somewhere or do something.

None of this, of course, is a secret. It was known to all before Vancouver was selected as host city in 2003, a few years after Whistler had been removed, albeit temporarily, from the World Cup alpine ski circuit for the resort's maddening inability to put on races as scheduled because of inclemency.

Most well-traveled Olympic athletes understand the conditions. Monday at the men's snowboard cross, gold medal winner Seth Wescott explained that his coach scolded him before the championship final run earlier for being "too East Coast, right-footing too much."

Translation: The drier snow of Eastern courses takes a weight shift to break the icy crust. But in the slush of Cypress, better balance keeps the board out of the soft stuff.

So, despite delays, the outdoor competitions themselves seem to be working, and so far do not seem likely to replicate the travails of Sarajevo in 1984 or Nagano in 1998, when some alpine events were postponed until the last day of the Olympics.

Naturally, the IOC, with its papal-like infallibility, will concede nothing.

"We looked at the weather conditions (before Vancouver was selected)," he said. "We were happy. We still are happy. If we had to make the decision again, we would make the same decision.

"It is just an exceptionally bad year."

Years from now, perhaps the Vancouver Games will be looked upon as the first for a warming planet that helped erase the distinction between summer and winter.